Tweet A Sound is a desktop application that uses Twitter as a platform for sharing sonic tweets. Pushing the idea of “social sound design”, Tweet A Sound allows you to design a sound and share it in a community of like-minded folks. It is an opportunity for fun interaction with sound.

Here is an introductory video showing you how to get started with Tweet A Sound. But remember you don’t need to know sound to do this, half the fun is tweaking the settings without knowing what they do! Just tweak and tweet!

Tweet A Sound has been built in Max/MSP. You do not need Max/MSP to run it, but for now you do need to be on Mac OS. I hope to have a Windows version out soon.

The sound engine is based on FM Synthesis and has a waveshaper, a delay, feedback and a flanger. You can get a ton of interesting sounds out of these.

The basics for making your tweet

In “Monitoring”, choose your audio driver.

Switch on the audio (it should be on from opening).

Design your sound.

Log in and send your tweet. For peace of mind, you will see the sent results. If for some reason you can’t send your tweet directly from Tweet A Sound, you can hit “copy tweet” and copy it to Twitter yourself.

The basics for receiving a tweet

In Twitter, either search for #tas (easy to remember, it’s the acronym for Tweet A Sound) or just get them through the people you’re following.

This is a stellar idea, Andrew. Rock on. Curious to see if the copy-then-paste-back-into-application method is any kind of barrier but otherwise great execution. (gotta wait until I get back home to try fully on mac…)

Hi James, thanks for letting me know. Could it be when you play with the amplitude envelope? If the last break point is anything but zero, it will keep playing that note. Do you think it could be that? Thanks for letting me know!

Cool idea and app! We have been working on sort of same technical concept about turning barcodes into music pieces. Look at the website. I think the potential is there for making whole songs that can be encoded in a tweet.

would it be hard to read a Twitter search results feed in the Tweet a Sound app? It seems like it would be easy, unless MAX is totally ignorant of the internet. I am totally ignorant of MAX, beyond the very basics (and that’s years ago…).

I am, sorry for the delay. I had issues when trying to compile it and I have been incredibly busy. I decided to first get a Mac update out and then releasing the Windows version. Hope it will be ready on time for you to integrate it into your project.

Thanks for the interest Lizi. I keep meaning to try build a windows version, but somehow can’t find the time or the Windows machine to do build it. I tried before ad had a to of problems. I will be trying again soon.

Hi Jas, I’m sorry that its quitting on launch. I’m runnng the same system as you and it works fine. I haven’t heard anyone else with that issue. Which version are you using? Maybe try an other version of TAS.